Documents / Official release

Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part II, 1965

National Aeronautics and Space Administration · 1965-06-09 · 290 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is a preliminary transcript of Part II of the Gemini 4 (GT-4) flight crew debriefing, prepared by NASA's Spacecraft Operations Branch, Flight Crew Support Division, and dated June 18, 1965. The debriefing began aboard the recovery ship USS Wasp and ended at the Manned Spacecraft Center. In it, astronauts McDivitt and White discuss how the spacecraft systems performed, including the platform, OAMS, RCS and control modes. They also cover operational checks, visual sightings, experiments, mission planning and training, and give recommendations for future crews.

From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: 6/9/65, North Atlantic Ocean. This document is a preliminary transcript (Part II) derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 4 flight crew debriefing taken aboard the recovery ship, USS Wasp, on June 9, 1965. Part II of this document contains the “Visual Sightings” section of the debriefing (pages 196-224), where astronauts James McDivitt and Edward White describe their observations while aboard the spacecraft.

  • p. 17 …it, I 'd start pulsing a little harder. You'd hear a series of about five…
  • p. 267 …on your back is about five times harder than it is when you're sitting up…
234 CO f'J F. IDEf'J +IA L
12.0 PRE- MISSION PLANNING
12 . 1 filssion Plan (Trajectory)
McDivitt
12.2 Flight Plan
McDivitt
It is pretty difficult to debrief this pre-:-mission
planning because we had so many pre-mission plans
that we couldn't keep track of them all. I think
that we started too late on the mission planning
for GT-4 , because everyone was concent:r:ating on
GT-3 . Then in the two and a half months that we
had to do the mission plans , we changed it about
three or four times , drastically. We nqt only
changed the trajectory, but we changed the altitudes
of insertion; a t one time we were shooting for a 87-
145 orbit and then a 87-161, and then we changed it
from 90 degree launch azimuth to a 72 deg:cee launch
azimuth. We changed how we were going to handle the
decay of the orbit . All in all, I think our
mission plan changed just too often .
Same with the flight plan. We kept changing it
around and changing it around and changing it
around. It was r eally unfortunate . Up until about
ten days before the flight we were really prepared
for about two different flights, and finally we got
COt>~FFDEt-~TIAl

Cases discussed

About this file

Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 290 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.